Family follies: with his latest production, Boys and Girls, out playwright Tom Donaghy takes an unflinching look at the pitfalls of gay parenting. (theater).

Tom Donaghy has a way with words. And often that's a problem. "When people talk about my work, they talk about the writing, not the plays," admits the 38-year-old playwright. He is hoping that his latest project Boys and Girls, will change that: "It's of the cultural moment right now in a way some of my other plays aren't."

The play, being presented from May 3 through June 9 by New York's Playwrights Horizons at the Duke on 42nd Street, concerns a lesbian couple who enlist a gay friend to help raise their son. The women want a male role model for their child, but when their friend gets back together with his unstable ex-lover, bickering, name-calling, and all-around hysterics ensue. Of course, it doesn't help that one of the women once slept with one of the men.

While Donaghy jokes that his play isn't "going to win any GIAAD awards," it does raise relevant questions about the potential complications gay parenting invites. "We are pioneering another way of life," says Donaghy, who is gay. "We are attempting to solve the problems of single and unmarried straight parents. Twenty years from now, gay kids will have grown up having watched us make all our mistakes. We are the first generation sorting through the `how.'"

Donaghy's previous plays, available in the recent collection The Beginning of August and Other Plays (Grove/Atlantic), all examine gay people's uneasy place within the family. Boys and Girls is a logical extension of those concerns, showing how gay parenthood may originate with love and a desire for social legitimacy but can also intensify a couple's existing problems. As a result, Boys and Girls is less a play about gay child-rearing than a funny and unsettling look at contemporary relationships. "I think most of us seek people who possess our insanity, neuroses, or best qualities," he says of his characters' emotional turmoil. "We wrestle with those issues through others instead of with ourselves."

Yet, as in all his work, Donaghy isn't providing any easy answers. "I'm not interested in perpetuating a sort of theater language that's neat, tidy, moralizing and puts the middle class to bed at night," he says. "I don't want to get in the way. And that's also what I get in trouble for. It's almost like a Rorschach: Here it is--what do you think of it? There's room for the audience in my plays."